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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

For those few who might wonder, yes I'm still here and alive. I just haven't had much to write about.

Our regular d&d group took a bit of a break as people's lives grew busy and we didn't have what I considered to be a quorum. At the same time, in WoW I was in a 10man raiding guild that was pushing towards 10man heroics and the familiar burnout was creeping in.

As for WoW, our 10man guild that both me and my wife were in was making the push every week and managing to down the new bosses in the week they were released. I believe there was one exception with Professor Putricide where we used all 10 tries and didn't get him down in the first week. Otherwise we were making terrific progress and competing with the 25man guilds for 10man firsts, considering the gear differences and less double-dipping on frost emblems from 10 and 25 man, I thought we were doing extremely well. The stumbling block came with Sindragosa, our first 15 tries out of the 20 allowed did not go well, though progress was made. One issue in my opinion was that we needed to do tank swapping in the third phase. This phase involved intense debuffs on the tank while members of the raid had to run away from the boss to avoid freezing the rest of the raid and other members had to use the ice blocks created to drop debuffs. Our raid/guild leader insisted on having me tank the whole fight without tank swapping, claiming our heals were great and this was doable. After our 15 tries on Wednesday and an extra session the following Sunday, I looked forward to trying our last 5 tries with tank swapping on Monday. But this was not to happen, my wife and I logged in on Monday to find that we had both been removed from the guild, the guild leader citing "poor" performance for my wife and avoidance of intraguild conflict as a reason to remove her and me. His comment was that she should be healing a lot more than his logs said she was and had poor "raid awareness", and if they were going to push into heroics they were going to have to get better healing.

It would have been nice if he had brought this up earlier to try and address this, which might have been why he was asking her to go discipline a couple of weeks earlier. In both of our opinions he was wrong, he obviously wasn't aware of what she brought to the table, as well as understanding that he had a strong paladin healer that was able to snipe heals from the priest and gained the benefit of her constant use of her guardian spirit (+40% healing) for 10 seconds every minute. The only problems she had with raid awareness was the same problems everyone was having with becoming familiar with the fight mechanics and required movements.

I think our opinion that he was wrong has been born out. Sindragosa was released February 2nd, the guild finally beat her 2 weeks later ( probably by tank switching ) and have made no more progress since then. Meanwhile 6 other guilds have started doing 10man heroic encounters while my old guild still languishes in regular.

After reading what happened and how it was presented you might think that we are bitter, but this is not the case. The guild removal came when I was burning out, but was dreading asking for a break because the guild had been made to have only 10 raiders so we had to raid when scheduled. It was a breath of fresh air for me and my wife liked to pug raids so was free to do that. We aren't pushing content anymore, but then neither is our old guild, while not bitter, it's nice to have some vindication.